When Justin Howard steps from the wings to take center stage at Metro, he looks like he’s walked out of a poster charting the evolution of man—unkempt, hairy, and dressed in what appear to be hides and furs, he’d fit in a step or two to the left of Homo sapiens. The 28-year-old bearded barbarian is known in the demimonde of U.S. Air Guitar as Nordic Thunder, and though his ax is imaginary, the rock-god reception he draws from the crowd is real.
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To kick off his first-round performance, Howard hoists a hollowed-out horn and gulps stale beer from it. He points to the heavens and the heavens answer with “Sirius,” the Alan Parsons Project instrumental synonymous with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. With each booming guitar reverberation, Howard windmills like Pete Townshend and spits a mist of beer into the green lights overhead. A crack of strobe lightning signals a break into a snippet of “Dragon Chaser,” by German power-metal band At Vance. Howard whips his long dark hair, head-banging as he picks invisible strings. He crams as much Scandinavian jukebox fury as humanly possible into 60 seconds, and when his brief routine is over, the crowd is his.
“Pain is temporary, but air guitar is forever” is Howard’s motto, and Nordic Thunder always goes for it. This time, what he calls his “power slide” runs a little long, and the only things that keep him from careening clear off the stage are a couple stage lights (one of which does fall) and a grumpy bouncer.
Howard’s mission is to defeat the man who’s beaten his fellow Americans for the past two years: backflipping, gold-spandex-wearing Frenchman Sylvain “Gunther Love” Quimene. In 2009 he edged out both Billmeier (defending his 2008 world title) and American champ Andrew “William Ocean” Litz, and in 2010 U.S. champion and Chicagoan Matt “Romeo DanceCheetah” Cornelison didn’t even make it to the second round against him.
It’s up to Pam Howard—mother of Nordic Thunder—to nip in the bud what might’ve been the first air-guitar birther conspiracy. From her home in Casper, Wyoming, she calls the records office in Austin and explains that her son is an American patriot. What she says, as he remembers it, is something like “He’s going over to Finland to represent our country on a global stage.” Suddenly the wait isn’t quite so long. One long-form birth certificate, coming up.
Howard sounds affronted. “It was on sale for way cheap,” he says. “And I like a good deal when I see one.”
